Roots with Wings, a Floyd County Place-Based Education Project:: Intergenerational Connections

Floyd Story Center

Since 1998, a community oral history collection partnership of the Old Church Gallery, Ltd., Radford University’s Center for Social and Cultural Research, Honors Program, Scholar-Citizen Initiative, Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, and Floyd County High School. Our archives now hold over 100 interviews.

In our Roots with Wings project, college mentors, high school staff, and community volunteers meet weekly during the school year to teach the discipline of oral history collection.


Students learn ethical, methodologically sound interview techniques, practice and complete several interviews, transcribe the audiotapes, create searchable content logs, archive interviewee resources and period photographs, learn the technology of audio and video recording, research historical backgrounds, acquire proficiency in iMovie and storytelling, and finally extract a theme from an hour long interview to create a seven minute movie production.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Fresh Air Brings Fresh Ideas

Interview Question Brainstorming Gets Us Rolling  

Thursday proved to be a a beautiful blue-sky-and-sun kind of day and was perfect for us to sit outside in our interview groups and enjoy the fresh air and sunlight. We divided up into our eight groups and were each assigned to one of the four interviewees.

After reading short biographies of each interviewee we got to brainstorm the types of questions we wanted to ask them. It was fun to read a little snippet about each of the interviewees--life experiences, jobs, and interests are all so varied and quite interesting. They range from working in and owning shops to participating in tractor pull contests. From being in the US Navy to being preachers and everything in between. Each person has a story to tell and we are excited to see what theirs will be!

These little tastes got us excited to meet them in person and helped us to think about what kinds of questions we would like to ask them and the themes we might be able to pull from their lives.

During this meeting many minds came together to imagine great questions and it was an exciting step in the process toward our interviews!

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